Geomagnetic Fluctuations and Free Response Anomalous Cognition: a New Understanding

Efforts to establish whether a correlation between anomalous cognition (AC) performance and geomagnetic fluctuations exists have met with mixed results, a negative correlation being seen in some studies and not in other comparable ones. Confirming this observation, in a large database of 2,879 free-response trials the Spearman’s ρ correlation between the ap geomagnetic index and AC effect size was –0.029 (p = 0.06). However, a large increase in the magnitude of the correlation was found at approximately 13 hours Local Sidereal Time, the longitudinal-like astronomical coordinate for the portion of the celestial sphere that is directly overhead at the time of the viewing. This sharp increase of correlation may be connected with an earlier result: that the AC-effect size increases by 380% within ±1 hour of 13.5 LST. The correlation observed here for trials which occurred between 11.2 h and 14.8 h LST was –0.192 (N = 256, p = 0.002) while the correlation was effectively zero (ρ = –0.01, N = 2,623, ns) elsewhere. The maximum magnitude correlation of –0.33 (N = 134, p = 0.0001) was observed in the 12.9 ±1 h LST period. The negative correlation peak was confirmed in both the ganzfeld and remote viewing protocols and was homogeneously present in those individual studies with trials in the relevant sidereal time interval. This finding allows an understanding of a previous anomaly in the literature: the varying correlations to GMF found in different studies. For instance one large remote viewing study showed near zero overall correlation since few of the trials occurred in the critical time period. In another case a comparable study had a large correlation of –0.22 and by happenstance all the trials were conducted near 13 h LST. GMF Fluctuations and Free Response AC Submitted to The Journal of Parapsychology Page 2 Introduction For some years there has been speculation that anomalous cognition (AC) performance may be correlated with global geomagnetic field (GMF) fluctuations. This idea arose from the work of Persinger (e.g. 1988) who found that anecdotal cases of putative AC occurred on days when GMF fluctuations were significantly lower than on the preceding and following days. Many workers have investigated whether this interesting observation could be extended to laboratory anomalous cognition, but with mixed results. Tart (1988) and Persinger & Krippner (1989) found an association between high scoring AC trials and low GMF fluctuations, while Haraldsson and Gissurarson (1987) and Nelson & Dunne (1986) did not. In an unpublished meta-analysis this author collected 1,468 free response trials from 21 studies reasoning that the effect, if it existed, would be most easily detected in a large database with high effect size; in fact the overall correlation was a disappointing -0.0002 (Spearman’s ρ, N = 1,468, ns). Recently it has been shown that there is a relationship between free-response effect size and the Local Sidereal Time (LST) at which a trial occurs (Spottiswoode, 1997). In a database of 2,483 free response trials with a mean effect size of 0.122 overall, those trials that occurred within ±1h of 13.5 h LST showed a 380% increase in effect size. In light of this, it was considered worthwhile revisiting the correlation between anomalous cognition performance and geomagnetic fluctuations but including LST as a filtering variable.